“Interest in Windows Mobile 5.0 has grown steadily, and it now attracts far more developers than any rival mobile operating system. This should improve the likelihood of IT directors being able to buy line-of-business mobile applications for the Microsoft platform. More than 10,000 developers are currently working on applications for Windows Mobile 5.0. Part of the reason for this developer momentum is Microsoft’s programming model. Nick Jones, vice-president at analyst firm Gartner, said, “Every device using Windows Mobile 5.0 has the same interfaces, but that is absolutely not the case with other operating systems, such as Symbian.”

A piece by Gartner that has a typical Gartner conclusion: WM 5 is going to grow the WM Developer community because of device-by-device similarities, and more freedom than RIM or Nokia devices can give.

Love the “every device using Windows Mobile 5.0 has the same interfaces” dig at Symbian. That was four years ago. This week Gartner predicts the fragmented but magically open Android will dominate four years from now.

Gartner does not lie; not really. It is just like MSNBC, or a tarot card reader, or maybe even more like your average "blue ribbon investigation". They get paid for telling their customers what they want to hear.

IT managers the world over fill their budget requests with Gartner quotations. Or even more frequently, IT managers cover for their bad decisions pointing to the industry research. All the better if both Gartner and IDC make similar predictions.

Dude, really? The predictions for Windows Mobile dominance were predicated on exactly the same assumptions as Gartner's prediction of Android dominance. Wherever there is choice and a functional market (unlike the PC OS market for 25 years) there will be no one company crushing all competition.

JulesLt

While I have no doubt that Android is winning the market share war, there are a few important questions.

1) Does that translate to an equal development marketplace for developers – how many times larger will the Android install based need to be before the marketplace is as viable as iOS

2) How is basic Android development funded – right now, Google are willing to throw a lot of money at beating Microsoft and Apple, and they have deep pockets, but I doubt Android is generating as much money for Google as it costs.

3) The historical story has been retconned into the idea that Windows beat Apple because Windows was open. This ignores the reality on the ground – there were systems that were more open than Windows but failed, that Atari and Commodore also lost the home computing war to the PC, despite costing less.

It's interesting that no one uses the same rhetoric in the games console industry (where all attempts to create an open standard, from MSX onwards, have largely failed).

KenC

Before Nick Jones became a VP at Gartner, did he by chance work at Microsoft? Just asking.

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us '0 which is not a hashcash value.

Shaun

"No-one has done more to expose the lies and statistics bending done by Gartner that Daniel Eran Dilger"

And he'd know more about bending statistics than anyone. Even Paul Thurrot doesn't come close.

Vertti

What do you mean with that? Daniel's forte is what he does ie exposes BS.

Shaun

Oops, sorry, you actually believe Dilger!

Come on. It doesn't take much to drive a truck sized hole through Dilger's overly long Apple puff pieces. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of MacOSX internals will spot he's technically inaccurate about MacOSX at least half the time.

Add in his innate ability to selectively quote statistics from people like Gartner, Canalys or IDC when the companies financial reports say otherwise and you'd be asking if he's not playing Dr Hyde to Rob Enderle's Jekyll. Two sides of a bad coin. His graphs are just fantastic, switching scales and timelines to make Apple look good and everyone else look bad.

I remember when Dilger used to write for AppleInisder under a nom de plume but it was so easy to spot his writing style and sickly Apple brown nosing that I stopped reading AppleInsider entirely.

Tom

It is ironic that Gartner promoted wimo because of its consistent UI, and then promotes android in spite of its fragmented UI.

Yuvamani

The fragmented UI is only "skin" deep. This was a windows mobile thing that the manufacturers .. ie htc brought to the Android world.

The App UI is left to the discretion of the app developer. If you used standard WinMo / Android conventions you would have a standard app. Lots of app developers continue to do their own thing.

http://www.guyrintoul.com Guy Rintoul

In fairness – your sneering sarcasm aside – very few people or organisations predicted either Android or the iPhone back then. Hindsight's a great thing…

http://poseur.com/ Edwin W.

Gartner's raison d'etre—predicting the future—is ridiculous. They're astrologers with MBAs, and they deserve to be ridiculed.

And, actually, I think you are wrong: I believe people had been predicting an Apple phone since around the time the Treo was released. And others had been observing Google's developing interest in disrupting Microsoft's cash cow products, just as Sun had.

http://www.asymco.com asymco

Failure to predict the future does not stop some from ascribing authority to those who fail.

http://www.guyrintoul.com Guy Rintoul

As a follow-up, surely what they were in effect predicting was the rise of the smartphone, and they got that one right…

http://www.asymco.com asymco

They predicted the rise of the corporate smartphone and Windows as the dominant platform. Neither prediction came true.

Tom

It's not enough to have a consistent UI, if what you're consistent with is junk.

Jones said, "One of the great strengths of Windows Mobile is that it has a single owner in Microsoft. Therefore it is a relatively consistent platform, even when devices are produced by different manufacturers. Although it is being forced to support greater diversity of devices, we expect Mobile to remain far more consistent and backward compatible than the Java operating system."

Apple is a single owner of all things iOS, but what comes out of Cupertino is head and shoulders over what comes out of Redmont. Rim is falling behind as they can't match the stylistic quality of iOS, and the openness of Android will come back to bite Google hard enough to cause them to switch to Chrome.

We still wait for nokia to respond.

Siklov Boyski

Gartner did not count on Microsoft neglecting WM just like they also did with Internet Explorer. They most likely would have been the dominant operating system, but they dropped the ball big time. Yay! Go Ballmer!

RattyUK

They dropped the ball big time when the iPhone came out. Everyone wanted touch and apps… Microsoft thought that their business customers would stay… They were wrong.

His Shadow

True. Add in the fact that RIM carved out an Empire right underneath Microsoft's nose. Microsoft is having idiotic parades predicting the death of the iPhone. Really? They couldn't stop RIM from achieving ascendancy and near dominance in business and that was Microsoft's backyard! And as John Gruber has already pointed out, it isn't the iPhone that's killing WinMo, it's Android thats moving partners away from WinMo.

Iphoned

Yeah. Ms dropped the ball big time on mobile. Phones and tablets. But this is clearly in their DNA. Ms can only copy. So now ms is clearly in better position.

Google also it seems can only copy. Can one name a single indigenous successful Google product besides search?

Tom

I'm afraid goo copied search…

http://www.asymco.com asymco

Touché!

GoodyBird

Cut the crap.
by that line
Apple copied it's GUI from Xerox.

A superior implementation is not a 'copy',
if it's create a truly useful product, that add value to it's user.

Google search is the first useful WebCrawler.
iPhone is the first useful smartphone with touch UI.
gmail is the first useful web client email.
Macintosh is the first PC for consumer with a useful GUI.

First steam engine was a useless toy.
Every innovation is built upon previous generation of innovations.

ChimChim

Hotmail was the first useful web client email ('97). Google added features to the experience, but even those came well *after* Yahoo had surpassed Hotmail.

bonelyfish

If Microsoft succeeded, it would be only by one reason: development tools. Certainly there are development tools on all platforms for serious developers, but Visual Studio and .Net Framework has much learning curve for ad-hoc developers, e.g. company in-house staff, to make something useful.

Tom

Daniel Eran Dllger says it best, focusing on the fragmentation of the Google phones:
Google’s permissive handling of its Android platform is why HTC’s Hero, which may currently be the best Android phone, uses an entirely unique “Sense” user interface that isn’t shared by any other Android phone, not even HTC’s own Dream/G1 or Magic/myTouch. Motorola is crafting its own unique UI, as is LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. Because phone makers (and mobile operators) are all desperately clawing for some sort of unique differentiation to stand out among the hundreds of smartphones vying for attention, Android will be stretched in every direction to the point where customers won’t really benefit from any of the upsides of having a unified software platform, but will experience all of the problems associated with a software monoculture.

Add to this confusion phones with no clear OS update process, deceptive telco manipulation, new products with old versions (think Dell Slate), and they have a real mess.

Hamranhansenhansen

The common theme is Gartner promotes platforms that are confusing, that way buyers and users will need expert advice from … Gartner. The biggest threat to Gartner and other I-T interests are happy, satisfied Apple users who are set to just keep buying Apple next time and don't need anyone to decode the mobile landscape for them.

Nothing about Android has succeeded. The idea that's set to change is ludicrous. Based on what? The handset makers are unprofitable and some are going out of business. They pay license fees to Microsoft for every handset. It sells for the same price as iPhone but has much lower quality. It lacks consumer usability in a consumer electronics device. It sells best on closed carriers, but even Verizon is opening up in 4G. It has no native apps, no tablet support, no enterprise support, no central OS updates, no analog to iPod touch or iPod nano or the Mac. And it's being sued by 2 little companies called Apple and Oracle. It's about to face its first real competition from Microsoft, with a system that runs on the exact same handsets. There is rampant piracy and almost no money in developing apps for it. In website usage logs, it trails not only iPhone by a wide margin but also iPad.

Follow the money. Gartner is a company hired by IT departments. Their main research methodology involves asking their customers what they think (surveys, etc.) then selling the aggregate information back to the sample. In essence, they hold up a mirror to their clients and compliment them on their good looks.

itguy

Boom! Nailed it. This is PRECISELY what they do. And the sheep continue to follow.

> I believe people had been predicting
> an Apple phone since around the
> time the Treo was released

Remember, the first knock on iPhone was it was late. Same as iPad. There was so much speculation that these products were coming for so long beforehand that when they were finally introduced they were considered late. This got forgotten quickly because they were so visibly years ahead of everything else.

Users were pleading for an iPod phone since 2004 when iPod nano really took iPod mainstream. Users simply compared iPod nano to their phone and asked where is an Apple phone.

Also, Android was founded in 2003 and bought by Google in 2005.

yet another steve

Didn't analysts–for YEARS–generally predict that competition would eat into the iPods share? And didn't exactly the opposite happen?

These predictions represent simply, obvious, "conventional" wisdom. It's a good living selling this stuff to people whose budgets are large enough that the cost is a rounding error… and it gives people raising funding or justifying business decisions in large organizations cover.

The research is perhaps "objective." But like predicting the weather, there isn't even a metric or measurement to see how accurate they eventually are.

But, in fact, the biggest factor in this is totally unknowable: How much do they care in Cupertino?

Personally, I think there's a bigger question: Can Android produce profits for anyone? When the author of a leading app (I've heard it described as a "must have" on the radio) boasts that he's earning almost 100K a year from it… I see a platform that is not going to support professional indie software development. This blog has a very decided opinion on profitability for the handset industry. Maybe for the carriers…?

And certainly NOT for google.

Iphoned

"So what are these predictions of success for Android based on?"

How about 200k+ Android phones activated daily, vs. 135k for iPhone?

NormM

No, 230K activations per day for Apple (according to Steve Jobs at the recent iPod event), and about 500K iOS devices sold per day, according to recent Apple sales numbers: they passed 100M iOS devices on July 21 (financial call), and 120M on Sept 1 (iPod special event).

poru

But if those 200K activations' profits are (a) much lower per device than Apple's and (b) fragmented among many players, how many Android manufacturers are going to make enough money and have a critical mass of users to succeed?

I'd like to see stats for those activations broken down by:
a) price/estimated profit
b) manufacturer
c) carrier

Asymco? Bueller? Anyone…?

Vertti

Gartner is getting way too much publicity. Much more than they deserve.

Yuvamani

My take on this :

"More than 10,000 developers are currently working on applications for Windows Mobile 5.0"

Apps do not save a platform …If you think Apple has an undefeatable position because of its apps. Think again…

Symbian thought it was in the same position and so did Microsoft / Gartner.

In the end marketshare alone talks.

Kenny

"In the end marketshare alone talks."

By your logic, Symbian is a better platform than Android, since they have the most marketshare. Why would you waste time on Android?

Yuvamani

"By your logic, Symbian is a better platform than Android, since they have the most marketshare. Why would you waste time on Android?"

Symbians marketshare was why so many apps were written for Symbian in the first place. When the iPhone was launched and I got one my friends ridled me for buying a phone without any apps. Some refused to call the iPhone a "smartphone" instead calling it a "featurephone" because it could not run apps. The Symbian evangelist was saying the equivalent of developers developers etc. The point they made then was that no new platform could compete against them because of their lead in apps and app developers. Windows Mobile gave an equivalent story sometime later …

Now its iPhone and Android…. And in a few years half a million apps have been written for these platforms.

If you think that it is seriously a competitive advantage, you are making the same mistake Windows Mobile made or Symbian made or even Palm which refused to update its os because so many apps were written for the old platform.

I am in the process of writing a new App. I am writing for Android first. Its marketshare is good AND rising. If I target Symbian its marketshare will be less by the time I finish the app.

Most companies and developers like to make their app reach as many customers as they can… Can an airline company invest in a flight status app which works only for 5% of their customer base (ie write for 1 platform) or try their best to reach 50% of their customers….

If you are an indie app developer you may have a good reason to write for the iPhone. Most developers and companies on the other hand are pragmatists. Market share influences their decision more than anything else.

berult

Risk-taking does not a pragmatist make. Grounded risk-taking does.

When a Platform grows on the basis of its weaknesses, equilibrium is set to be broken sooner rather than later. Android is loose and free. Tenuous and fragile on the Patent enforcement and infringement grounds, unsecured from the ground up for quick and efficient diffusion, robust and highly targetable on secured copycat abusing grounds.

Indeed, Android covers a lot of ground. As It's meant to do. Shouldn't you as a developer, a self-defined pragmatist at that, refine your decision-making process so as to let substance feels its way into such a rugged, one dimensional mould? I'm afraid you could very well understate your own creative genius in exposing it in a user experience's …parking lot…!

Tom

If marketshare alone talks, then android has already won, and easily. If not this month, then next. Okay.
Yuvamani, go ahead and take a 60-80% pay cut as you work more hours to make more widgets that all get sold dirt cheap and dominate the market. How long would you like to keep it up, especially if you saw another pay cut coming?
Or, make the best widget, and sell it at a premium price, watching your future ability to make even better widgets rise with your rising bank balance.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com Ariel

All speculation. Take it or leave it.
The only one talking sense here is Guy Rintoul. When you all bring up valid point, the bigger picture is more complex, and so predicting a prediction is false is just as unfounded as the prediction in the first place.
But I love how fanboys are attracted to this stuff, it only proves the age old confirmation bias.
We'll look back at this article in two years and I'm gonna laugh at this article and the commenters voiced their support, that's the only way this will be settled.

Vertti

You think? Apple is just starting to warming up it's muscles. Have to iCal this.

Vertti

damn typos

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

I'd love to Google Calendar this, however, it will only be passing gratification to look back at this article and remember the days when people didn't see how big Android will be (or how stupid I was to think it would).

If I've still got my blog running in two years, feel free to drop a comment telling me how right I was. XD

berult

Financial analysts get stuck on the bird's eye view, the big picture meme. Tech analysts, lest they carry some hidden agendas, focus on a perception and a presumption of measurable innovation.

They both have it right in so far as numbers don't lie if generated honestly, with bias constants fully accounted for. The principle of uncertainty, however, rules the numbers game. And that's how the whole morphs into so much more than the sum of its parts, if the dice are thrown where the results can register.

Somehow, somewhere, in the aggregate, an additive gets played in C major and becomes, by laws of symmetry, synergy or Mozartian proclivity, highly addictive . But pundits and analysts are forever stuck on the extrapolation mode, whereas a qualitative mutation can only be discovered "out" on an interpolation quest.

While dismissed from the outset as ''Skype'' revisited, Facetime, done in an Apple integrated way, could be the ultimate human serendipity factor that makes iOS more than the sum of its parts; a giant leap from the commercial highjacking of interpersonal communications, to the unmediated, willful and spontaneous expression of human solidarity on a "one-on-one" "seeing is believing" agenda, and eventually, on a multi-personal and social agenda.; a parallel communication freeway to rival the officially sanctioned one.

That sort of consideration and pondering cannot be embedded into statistical analysis. Neither can it be factored into punditry prosaic prognosis diarrhea. Four years from now, three years hence, perhaps even sooner, post-mortem studies of past analysis, their derivative promotional material, their shoe-ins and champions-to-be, will be sitting on the back burner while iOS chats along in four dimensional History making.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

As hard as it is to understand, I believe you give quality of product too much credit. Market success has less to do with quality rather than market factors. Quality has a large part, but it is still over shadowed by factors that have nothing to do with quality.

For example, I believe OSX is a much more pleasant product to use, however I cannot see myself using it, or recommending it to most of the people I know, because Windows simply has more software. But the reason Windows won the desktop was because of a single market factor which without Mac OS hadn't a chance: licensing (note this is a market factor, and nothing to do quality of product).

Likewise, iOS is a much more pleasant experience than Android at the moment. However there is once again the same factor that limits it's market success. This time around there are other factors in play which fanboys like me love to throw in debates, but their effect in the market has yet to prove itself (openness, standards, cloud vs. local computing etc). I personally definitely cannot use an iOS device, and I will soon not be able to recommend one either if things keep going the way they are.

In technology in general, software innovation rarely credits the inventor, as far as I can tell. So the actual product usually has less of a role in Gartner's predictions.

http://www.asymco.com asymco

By your definition of success GM is successful and BMW is not. BMW is a more pleasant experience but has limited distribution, limited portfolio, limited brands and a high price meaning that its market success is constrained. GM on the other hand with a mediocre experience but thousands more dealerships, a wide portfolio of form factors and brands and a platform approach to car development is wildly successful.

I am not entirely being sarcastic, if you rolled the clock back to the 1950s or 60s what I suggest about the Auto industry was completely true. As the industry evolved it no longer held true.

A recurring theme in what I write is that the allocation of profit or "success" shifts with time as the underlying product goes across the "good enough" boundary. It's called value chain evolution. There is a slightly longer story to be told about the evaporation and condensation of profits (and the law of conservation of profits) but I won't expand on that now.

Bottom line: If you are on the wrong side of the boundary with the wrong business plan you lose. I am very comfortable betting that the good enough boundary for smartphones (and hence mobile computing) will not be crossed in the next three years and hence strategies that assume a stratified or modular value chain will struggle.

berult

For me, the sole Apple product on the market is Jobs' deep and intuitive knowledge of a consumer's engagement with the paradoxical "perennial/disposable" nature of the environment. Jobs comes in different forms and shapes, but in the end, you get what you pay for: interaction with a complex and alienating world on a first name basis.

I believe Facetime is the Lingua Franca of Jobian enfranchised welfare society. The market for speaking in and out on yourself and the world is quite ready for an earful of free flowing words from a vectorized Jobs.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

@asymco

I'm sure you can teach me much about the economics of the market, and especially on the definition of "success". However, it's best if my statements of "success" are limited to market share success. There are many, many things to consider when discussing "success", and with every industry (automotive or handheld electronics) it can be quite different.

I believe that next year and perhaps the year after that will see intense competition on the OS platform front, but eventually one will dominate the other(s) by a significant margin (and this also depends on the cloud and how it will be adopted across platforms). This happens as a result of a unified platform in which many can compete on lower margins instead of the development of the entire package and platform, which all goes hand in hand with commoditization.

However, to predict that smartphones will not be commoditized within the next three years is bold to say the least. The desktop was settled very quickly, and in this industry of exponential growth, it can be assumed it will not take longer for a similar scenario to settle.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

@berult

I see no reason for your assumption. Jobs offers a compelling concept of a product. But we don't all need walled gardened products that fulfill first name conversations with this "alien world", which, I might add, we are all already willingly adopting. And it just doesn't justify the market all bending under him to all support the one platform that only he makes and distributes. You can't eat the pie and have it too.

Jobs gives himself too much credit. He probably deserves it. But nobody likes a showoff. Jobs and his product are just not enough in the elbow-shoving nature of the capitalistic market.

http://www.asymco.com asymco

I've been observing (professionally) the smartphone market from its inception and was holding my breath for the commoditization of handsets that Microsoft promised all the way from 2004 through 2009. Several generations of Windows Mobile were predicated on the imminent stabilization of hardware and user experiences years before the iPhone came along. Not only Microsoft but Palm via PalmSource, Symbian as a consortium of all incumbents, Sun & IBM via Java, DoCoMo with iMode and not least of all, Qualcomm with BREW all made the same bets and ran with horizontal strategies toward a smartphone future built on the lessons of the PC industry. The only holdout for the integrated approach was the one company that everybody marked for dead: RIM. It's also the only one who raked in all the profits.

All this happened before 2007.

To suggest that this time, in 2010, it's different: that the definition of the smartphone as it exists today is the product at its zenith; that user experiences and expectations and hardware specifications and platform dynamics will be henceforth frozen with minor sustaining tweaks to look forward to is, in my opinion, a far riskier bet.

I don't try to be a futurist or predictor of how the product will evolve, but I can see a dozen ways (which I hope to enumerate in a future article) of how the very definition of a smartphone will change and how in 4 years we'll have products that won't be recognizable as such today.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

@asymco

Fair enough. The smartphone (as much as it has evolved) has been on a rocky road. And I will most definitely agree with you that mobile technology is fast changing and 4 years from now will indeed look very different than today. I guess this really only leaves for us to look back in hindsight when this is all behind us.

However, I would ask you, do you see any trend recently that points to something different in smartphones today irrespective of how they look/work at any specific point in time or who specifically makes them?

I don't expect user experiences and expectations and hardware specifications and platform dynamics to freeze. I don't for a second believe the smartphone is at it's zenith. But if anything is to gain traction, it's to agree on a platform from which to jump to the next step. In this respect, the only difference I see between smartphones and PCs is that this time we have the cloud, which is it's own platform.

But the cloud has yet to gain it's own traction as a platform, and until then, we have mobile operating systems to rely on for most our mobile computing. So why are 2010's mobile operating systems different than those before? What's this trend we've recently been seeing? Today smartphones are actually beginning to significantly enter the mainstream. As far as I can tell, that's gotta account for something, if not everything, regarding this topic.

http://www.asymco.com asymco

@Ariel,

Suggest you re-post this comment to the article I wrote promoting this discussion. I will take it up there.

@berult
Gee, and all this time, I thought I was talking to my wife on face time.

Tom

@berult
If you're smoking something, you'd better stop. If you're not smoking something, you'd better start.
You forgot the whole focus in all this: the guy who spends money to get something. Not the market factors, or any CEO, or share, or anything else. If I like something, I'll buy it. Considering Android, I see a lot that is inferior as a brand, so I don't buy it. For you or the little mermaid to focus solely on non consumer factors, consciously excluding consumer considerations, I'm just glad you're not trying to sell anything on the market. It would be some high falutin' piece of junk.

http://vlujunbaga.blogspot.com/ Ariel

You'd be surprised, but a lot of stuff happens before you look at a product, it's quality and it's price. You said it yourself: market factors, CEOs, share and anything else determines a product's quality and price. Only after you take all those into consideration, the consumer is left to decide if the quality is worth the price.

Like I said, OSX is a more pleasant product, but I prefer laying down less money for Windows. Also because Windows has more software, and that has to do with developers, which has to do with market share, which has to do with CEOs… Etc.

Market share is a superficial metric. all it is totally good for is bragging rights.

from a business perspective, it's about profits. right now Apple is taking the lion's share of the smartphone market profits, and that will continue if it keeps 30% of unit sales as Gartner projects.

from a consumer perspective, it's about their situation. not when shopping, but what they are stuck with in a two year contract afterwards. that is the big problem of Android, with its OEM fragmentation and telco manipulation.